Typically, shoppers browse selections offered by participating on-line merchants by specifying criteria regarding the type of product they would like to find such as the manufacturers product features or price tags. Based on product attributes entered by the shopper into a browser, such as Netscape, the browser interrogates the databases of on-line merchants for the product attributes entered by the shopper into the system. The system ranks the products turned up by the database search based on ranking algorithms which take into consideration various ranking factors, such as the number of occurrences of terms in documents, the proximity of terms to one another within the documents, etc., and provides the products to the seller listed in order of their rank.
While this method helps shoppers locate products and services they desire, it limits the amount of control shoppers have over the shopping environment and experience. Generally speaking, for the same set of database interrogations, each of the shoppers would receive the same set of results and in the same order. To tailor the presentations to the shopper, a number of systems analyze the on-line behavior of the shopper to vary characteristics and elements of the displays presented to the shoppers to the individual shopper's preferences and needs. The shopper's characteristics that may be used to tailor the presentations would include previous data on stores visited, time of the visit, length of the visit, merchandise viewed, purchases made, frequency of visits, etc.
While a number of such systems have been proposed to tailor the materials provided to the user based on user preferences, there is a dearth of ways for the seller to promote products it wishes to bring particular attention to. One method known is the use of advertising banners on third party web sites that try to induce a shopper to visit a specified web site of the banner provider. This usually requires a small fee to be paid by the banner to the third party site owner of the banner display site. In addition as more and more use is made of such banners, users tend to ignore them when looking at a web page. The user's eyes focus on the central part of the screen and avoid viewing the periphery of the screen where the banners are displayed.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a new way for an on-line merchant to emphasize products he wishes to bring to the attention of shoppers.
Another object of the invention is to provide a consistent marketing strategy with respect to products they wish to promote.
It is another object of the invention to provide a way for merchants to promote certain products and services in a deterministic manner.